People on here have provided good reasons to why the Amiga failed, and I don't really dispute any of them, but it still makes me very sad.
I feel like there was a roughly three year period where Amiga really was better than all the competition. AmigaOS was really impressive, the hardware was cheaper and more capable than Apples, and categorically better than whatever Microsoft was doing. It feels like the management at Commodore didn't really realize the head start that they had; it appears that instead of continuing to grow the OS, they just were happy enough enough keep things business-as-usual and eventually Apple and Microsoft caught up.
That all makes enough sense, but I feel like there exists an alternate universe where Commodore was competently managed, and in 2024 we are all running Commodore machines instead of Apple.
The engineers knew what they had. Marketing failed to market it properly because they didn't understand what they had. Management, as you said, also didn't understand what they had. Thomas Rattigan understood and started the A500 and A2000 projects. Then, head of the board, Irving Gould, fired him.
The root of Commodore' demise goes back to the 1960's when Jack Tramiel let Irving Gould invest to keep Commodore from going bankrupt after Jack made some bad business deals. Without that mistake, Irving Gould wouldn't have caused Jack to leave by preventing Jack's sons from entering management, and wouldn't have pushed out Rattigan or cut R&D which prevented the Amiga chipset from keeping ahead of the industry.
Gould made Commodore his own personal piggy bank, but under Tramiel I have a hard time seeing Commodore ever purchasing Amiga in the first place. Tramiel's double-dealing and brazen nepotism didn't do Commodore (or Atari) any favors either.
I owned an Amiga 500 but had to switch to a PC when I saw the writing on the wall. For many years it was almost painful to think about the lost opportunity the world missed out on. If they had managed the platform better, we would probably see much better computers and operating systems sooner due to the increased competition.
I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.
By the early 90s the design and graphics-focused software for color Macintosh systems was light years better than Amiga. And the high-end video modes on Macs simply worked out of the box. If you needed a Gen-locked system for your local TV station, sure - get an Amiga. Ironically the custom chips that made the Amiga so special and a natural fit for broadcast design is also what killed its ability to use interlaced video modes that didn't make your eyes bleed or require special hardware. Most folks by then didn't want to learn how to make the Amiga "do all the same things". They wanted to go to the store, buy a computer that worked like the ones at school or work and use it. Period.
I have a Quadra 700 (same era as the Amiga 3000, which I also have) that can run circles around the 3000 with far less power or needed upgrades. For example by adding a decent video card the Q700 can output to dual monitors, each running their own resolutions and color depths - while multi-tasking. I can install triple-A CD-based software titles (like Photoshop or Illustrator or Pagemaker or MS Word) and on and on. The tools on Amiga pale in comparison even while the hardware was cool. In the 80s the Amiga was magical. By 1992 the way it seemingly just stood still was tragic.
As previously stated, high-quality print had become a "killer app" and Amiga simply didn't get the same support. And a lot of this had to do with their native video modes.
I can throw video cards and processor cards at the Amiga and make it a much more technically impressive machine. But if I want to run A+ professional software on it I basically need to run a Mac emulator.
As the video points out, the gaming market by '92 was moving on in the US. For 2D the SNES and Genesis took over. For 3D the PC arms race had begun, and there was no looking back.
> It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga.
By the early '90s, new DOS PCs had VGA and Sound Blaster cards as standard equipment, and were usually also including Windows 3.x. That put the typical PC clone on par with Amiga for most home/office use cases, especially including gaming.
> It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home.
Apple didn't have much of a foothold in the home at this point -- their bread-and-butter market was schools, and they were just beginning to get a foothold in the design and DTP market -- and Apple itself was in deep trouble for similar reasons to Commodore.
The fact that IBM PCs and compatibles had become the de facto standard for business computing is one of the exact reasons why Apple, Atari, and Commodore started losing market share in the early '90s.
If you could buy a single machine that's good for both business and gaming --- one that runs Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Wolfenstein 3D, and King's Quest V -- perfectly, why would you pay even more for a proprietary platform that only excelled at one set of use cases at the expense of the other?
This was the era of convergence between home and office computing, and the fact that IBM-compatibles dominated the office market, the capabilities of PCs had reached near-parity with the Amiga, and the PC was an open architecture with a large ecosystem of OEMs all competing with each other and driving prices down, spelled doom for any non-x86 computing platform by the mid-'90s.
Yeah, though people have explained to me that there were things in the Amiga that kind of "stayed primitive". While I think it's insanely cool how early they got preemptive multitasking, something that I think hurt them was the fact that by-design it didn't really support any kind of protected memory.
The Amiga was a bit before my time, sadly, so I'm getting Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this; my dad had one when I was very young but all I ever used it for was playing games. Still, it's easy to look back at these things and feel like things should have been different; particularly I feel like Microsoft got way more slack than it should have. DOS, which felt really primitive by the early 90s, still seemed to be more-or-less standard until Windows 95.
I think this Amiga version of history ignores what Apple was good at by the late 80s: DTP. We collectively seem to have forgotten what a huge deal this was, laser printing, postscript etc. It genuinely overhauled the entire publishing industry, not entirely for the better either.
By the mid 90s Microsoft were persuading a lot of people WinNT would displace Apple in publishing, but that never quite worked out how they intended either. (This is one of the reasons Xara was developed on the PC and not the Mac, which with hindsight was a big mistake).
The Amiga had good DTP software and hardware at the time. I used them for large format printing. They were initially faster and much cheaper than the Apple solutions.
Fair enough; I guess I'm applying a 2024 lens to a 1988 problem. We don't print a lot anymore, but that I will acknowledge that that was really really important back in the 80s and 90s.
Only briefly. Before about 1988, Unix systems (Interleaf and Frame) were still clear leaders, and then Apple began to stumble from around 1990 - the IIfx was the top of the line for a looong time, and soon looked very dated compared to the 486-based systems selling for a quarter of the price.
But, yeah, for those couple of years the combination of the Mac II, Laserwriter II, and Ready Set Go / Pagemaker / Quark was king. The Amiga never really had a chance to gain a foothold.
The Amiga was dead before a Wolfenstein 3D came out on the PC. A lot of Amiga users failed to recognize it at the time but commodore surely and truly killed that thing off by his horrible mismanagement. When Wolfenstein 3D came around it was really just shifted from keeping it on life support hoping it would awake from its coma to palliative care.
My parents called this before Wolfenstein even came out, though they did it with the Commodore 64 and 128. I really wanted a 128, and they insisted on an IBM compatible instead.
I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
Your parents were wrong. Assuming you wanted to play games as well as run productivity software, the C128 was far superior to any PC in 1985. Yes the PC would eventually catch up in the 90s, but the C128 was discontinued by then.
I had a Commodore 64 that I had bought with my own money, but my friend (rather his dad) had a Commodore 128 with a floppy drive. I was so impressed but also extremely jealous. My brother though bought a PC.
My experience is almost identical. I had a Vic20, C64, C128 and then an A1000 as a kid, then my parents bought a 286 AT 10MHZ with a 20MB HDD and everything changed. They were absolutely right. Had I stuck with Commodore instead of switching in 10th grade, I would have been way behind.
My family had a Beeb with 128KB of RAM. I thought XTs were awful. Sure, they had more RAM, but for our use cases (games and word processing), it wasn't really necessary. I even learnt Pascal on it.
I moved from an 8-bit Atari to a CGA IBM XT clone. This was both a step forwards and a step backwards. It wasn't until I upgraded to a 386SX PC with VGA and a SoundBlaster that I could totally retire the Atari.
As a proud commodore Amiga 500 owner starting in 1990 I agree.
When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.
The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.
For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.
The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
For PC games Commander Keen running on an EGA display was already enough for PC gaming to be good enough for me.
I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead.
It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).
They failed to evolve their product while the competition was rapidly improving. The orginal amiga was leaps in front of anything thing else you could get at remotely the same price point, for many features that mattered to games.
But then they only made the smallest incremental improvements to the hardware until they launched the AGA chipset with the A1200 and A4000 which was too little too late. Had the amiga improved at the same rate as consoles or dos PC's they might have had a chance.
The OS (mostly workbench) also did not see any big improvements over its lifetime.
I had an A1000 - even worked in high school at a Commodore/Amiga dealer.
What they really didn't understand is that software sells hardware: The OS was so far ahead, but in terms of basic productivity software? Even the Mac was ahead.
And [IMO] markets can maintain a leader and one strong competitor. But just one. So it became PC/Mac throughout the 90's on the desktop.
Commodore's bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.
As someone who followed the development of the Amiga and then bought the Amiga 1000 (plus everything else I could afford with my paper route earnings) the first day it was available -- I do NOT yearn to relive those days. I loved it then and as documented everywhere, it was a head of its time. However, the instability of software and how much Commodore didn't iterate on the technology -- that's what killed the Amiga. I still have PTSD from all the insane amount of crashing and rebooting my setup did.
Indeed, AmigaOS despite being ahead of its time in the '80s, was doomed to lose by the end of the '90s.
The biggest problem was that Amiga did not have an MMU until very late, and the OS has been designed for unprotected shared memory space. It was crashy, with fragmenting leaky memory, and it could not support fork(). Later AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS struggled to add full process isolation.
In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x, and incredibly successful in switching to the NT kernel. AmigaOS would have needed the same to survive, instead of just sitting on their multitasking-a-decade-before-Windows laurels.
VideoScape 3D and Sculpt 4D where my bread and butter at the time. Although anything would crash.
One day I'll rip and upload a video I made in the late 80s of when I was typing up a chemistry lab report. My Amiga was producing so many guru meditation errors I had my VCR record my typing (in real-time) so I had proof that I did the report. I handed in a draft of the report and a VHS tape.
I'd also add 3DStudio to the list of assassins. It was not even close to LightWave 3D, but it did not require a Video Toaster card and it ran on commodity PC hardware. Amiga never got software package that could outcompete Apple in the graphics, DTP departments either. Add to that the dead-end that was AmigaOS as well.
I feel like Amiga was never really alive in the US. I never knew anyone who owned one, or a 520st. Schools were almost exclusively Apple IIe, later some IIgs before Mac SE and LC. And of course PC. IIgs was more comparable to a Commodore 128 but it ran all the Apple II software. Sometimes you'd see a Mac II or SE/30 in an administrator's office running a screensaver.
It's one of those rare cases where being in the US or Europe gives an uniquely skewed perspective.
It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.
From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.
At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
For another data point, as kids in Greece we made fun of our friend who first switched to a PC, (we had Atari STs). Even after he got a Sound Blaster and a VGA card we still had better games like Kick Off and Dungeon Master. But one day he invited us to his house and showed as Wolfenstein. I distinctly remember the feeling. It was over!
Over half of the Amigas sold worldwide were the 500 model and, in Europe, most people with an Amiga had the 500 or 1200 at home for gaming so you would see it when you visited.
The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.
At least from my standpoint, this is completely true. I was hardcore Amiga (AmigaOS and Amiga MINIX) up until 1992 and then Wolfenstein 3D came out and it got me to buy a PC. The OS experience was comparatively terrible, but that game was so good in its day.
I would agree with the other poster that, as far as being a living product, the Amiga was already dead, but as a usable platform, there was still a very helpful, very large community.
I was a kid back then but as far as I understood the waves of computing DOS and Windows 3.0 was dominant in office settings at least a couple of years before Wolfenstein 3D was released, and such machines trickled into people's homes over those years and became part-time gaming stations and created pretty solid expectations in adults about how a computer should work and what to buy for their kids.
It wasn't entirely incompetence. Commodore marketing was incompetent but the bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.
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I feel like there was a roughly three year period where Amiga really was better than all the competition. AmigaOS was really impressive, the hardware was cheaper and more capable than Apples, and categorically better than whatever Microsoft was doing. It feels like the management at Commodore didn't really realize the head start that they had; it appears that instead of continuing to grow the OS, they just were happy enough enough keep things business-as-usual and eventually Apple and Microsoft caught up.
That all makes enough sense, but I feel like there exists an alternate universe where Commodore was competently managed, and in 2024 we are all running Commodore machines instead of Apple.
The root of Commodore' demise goes back to the 1960's when Jack Tramiel let Irving Gould invest to keep Commodore from going bankrupt after Jack made some bad business deals. Without that mistake, Irving Gould wouldn't have caused Jack to leave by preventing Jack's sons from entering management, and wouldn't have pushed out Rattigan or cut R&D which prevented the Amiga chipset from keeping ahead of the industry.
I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.
I have a Quadra 700 (same era as the Amiga 3000, which I also have) that can run circles around the 3000 with far less power or needed upgrades. For example by adding a decent video card the Q700 can output to dual monitors, each running their own resolutions and color depths - while multi-tasking. I can install triple-A CD-based software titles (like Photoshop or Illustrator or Pagemaker or MS Word) and on and on. The tools on Amiga pale in comparison even while the hardware was cool. In the 80s the Amiga was magical. By 1992 the way it seemingly just stood still was tragic.
As previously stated, high-quality print had become a "killer app" and Amiga simply didn't get the same support. And a lot of this had to do with their native video modes.
I can throw video cards and processor cards at the Amiga and make it a much more technically impressive machine. But if I want to run A+ professional software on it I basically need to run a Mac emulator.
As the video points out, the gaming market by '92 was moving on in the US. For 2D the SNES and Genesis took over. For 3D the PC arms race had begun, and there was no looking back.
By the early '90s, new DOS PCs had VGA and Sound Blaster cards as standard equipment, and were usually also including Windows 3.x. That put the typical PC clone on par with Amiga for most home/office use cases, especially including gaming.
> It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home.
Apple didn't have much of a foothold in the home at this point -- their bread-and-butter market was schools, and they were just beginning to get a foothold in the design and DTP market -- and Apple itself was in deep trouble for similar reasons to Commodore.
The fact that IBM PCs and compatibles had become the de facto standard for business computing is one of the exact reasons why Apple, Atari, and Commodore started losing market share in the early '90s.
If you could buy a single machine that's good for both business and gaming --- one that runs Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Wolfenstein 3D, and King's Quest V -- perfectly, why would you pay even more for a proprietary platform that only excelled at one set of use cases at the expense of the other?
This was the era of convergence between home and office computing, and the fact that IBM-compatibles dominated the office market, the capabilities of PCs had reached near-parity with the Amiga, and the PC was an open architecture with a large ecosystem of OEMs all competing with each other and driving prices down, spelled doom for any non-x86 computing platform by the mid-'90s.
The Amiga was a bit before my time, sadly, so I'm getting Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this; my dad had one when I was very young but all I ever used it for was playing games. Still, it's easy to look back at these things and feel like things should have been different; particularly I feel like Microsoft got way more slack than it should have. DOS, which felt really primitive by the early 90s, still seemed to be more-or-less standard until Windows 95.
By the mid 90s Microsoft were persuading a lot of people WinNT would displace Apple in publishing, but that never quite worked out how they intended either. (This is one of the reasons Xara was developed on the PC and not the Mac, which with hindsight was a big mistake).
Once the Quadra’s came out it was all over.
But, yeah, for those couple of years the combination of the Mac II, Laserwriter II, and Ready Set Go / Pagemaker / Quark was king. The Amiga never really had a chance to gain a foothold.
I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
Things definitely changed with 386s and Windows.
When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.
The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.
For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.
The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead.
It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).
But then they only made the smallest incremental improvements to the hardware until they launched the AGA chipset with the A1200 and A4000 which was too little too late. Had the amiga improved at the same rate as consoles or dos PC's they might have had a chance.
The OS (mostly workbench) also did not see any big improvements over its lifetime.
What they really didn't understand is that software sells hardware: The OS was so far ahead, but in terms of basic productivity software? Even the Mac was ahead.
And [IMO] markets can maintain a leader and one strong competitor. But just one. So it became PC/Mac throughout the 90's on the desktop.
Deleted Comment
The biggest problem was that Amiga did not have an MMU until very late, and the OS has been designed for unprotected shared memory space. It was crashy, with fragmenting leaky memory, and it could not support fork(). Later AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS struggled to add full process isolation.
In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x, and incredibly successful in switching to the NT kernel. AmigaOS would have needed the same to survive, instead of just sitting on their multitasking-a-decade-before-Windows laurels.
Did you mean protected memory? Didn't OS/2 have both earlier?
One day I'll rip and upload a video I made in the late 80s of when I was typing up a chemistry lab report. My Amiga was producing so many guru meditation errors I had my VCR record my typing (in real-time) so I had proof that I did the report. I handed in a draft of the report and a VHS tape.
Before 1.2, AmigaOS was very unstable.
It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.
From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.
At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.
I would agree with the other poster that, as far as being a living product, the Amiga was already dead, but as a usable platform, there was still a very helpful, very large community.